Circular Design Principles: Between Theory and Practice

It is no secret that the global building sector is enormously resource-intensive, consuming vast amounts of virgin materials and generating colossal quantities of waste. The environmental impacts of this linear flow of materials—from extraction to disposal—are profound and multifaceted. They affect air, water, and land quality for centuries to come. Over the past few decades, architectural projects and written manifestos have emerged that propose a wide range of solutions to mitigate the environmental impact of this material throughput. Circular Design Principles: Between Theory and Practice maps out the most significant of these efforts with an explicit didactic purpose.

Proponents of the circular economy have produced a plethora of diagrams. Most of these are aspirational, often featuring utopian, carousel-like arrangements of arrows to suggest endless cycles of material reuse.1 At their worst, however, such diagrams obfuscate the stark reality of resource consumption and waste generation.2 This chronogram explicitly acknowledges the gap between theoretical discourses on circularity and material efficiency on the one hand, and real-world practices of raw material consumption and waste disposal on the other. It is structured around this duality, with aspirational goals presented as text against a backdrop of material conditions depicted through icons.

The timeline in this diagram extends much further into the past than the traditional starting point of environmental awareness in the 1960s.3 It encompasses three centuries, tracing events back to 1750, recognizing that history is a rich reservoir of commendable circular practices in building.4 Many of these practices emerged out of necessity—in times when energy was expensive and rapid, cheap transportation was unavailable, and extraction landscapes were inaccessible. While these historical instances of “circularity out of necessity” were not driven by a conscious effort to “save the planet,” they embodied circular principles and are worth remembering.

The timeline primarily focuses on technological evolutions, building practices, and theoretical concepts from the West, with most events and projects occurring in European and North American contexts. We don’t posit this context as more important than others, but it happens to be the one we, from our own situated perspective, are most familiar with. This diagram has no pretense at being global. Indeed, the best attempts at restoring some degree of circularity to the building sector are predicated on being grounded in a local context.

Unlike Charles Jencks’s original Evolutionary Tree diagrams, Circular Design Principles avoids using “-isms” to label movements or theories. Instead, it represents movements through popular notions such as “industrial ecology” or “adaptive reuse,” which emerged at specific points in time, gained traction, and served as rallying cries for their proponents. As pragmatists, we prefer to stick to the vocabulary used by the proponents themselves, and not affix labels to them. While we recognize the potential for some of the terms used by our actors to obscure reality, we believe that a majority of them acted in good faith, and should be given the benefit of the doubt before being assigned definitive labels.

The diagram is structured as a two-dimensional matrix. The columns represent successive stages in the production and consumption of the built environment, from extraction (left) to manufacturing, building, use, dismantling, recycling, and finally waste (right). The rows form a timeline spanning three centuries, running from 1750 (top) to 2050 (bottom). The quarter century between today and 2050 is filled with notions we extrapolated from contemporary tendencies on a backdrop of speculated technological, logistic, and economic developments. While some developments are already incubating and can reasonably be expected, others might need the push that this diagram, like the gasps of an inebriated oracle, might offer.

The evolution of real-world practices over time, along with their varying intensities, is illustrated through a series of four diagrammatic section drawings. These depict the sequence of extraction, manufacturing, building, use, and disposal for four distinct historical moments. Each section features a hole on the left (representing extraction sites) and a hill on the right (representing waste heaps). Over time, as throughput increases, the quarries and mines grow deeper, and the waste piles grow taller.

The first section, at the top of the diagram, represents the year 1750. Extraction pits are relatively shallow, transportation relies on horse-drawn carts, and few machines are visible on building sites. Little waste is produced, as most demolition materials are reused or recycled. A century later, the diagram depicts 1880, at the height of the first wave of coal-powered industrialization. Quarries are deeper, rail transport dominates, exhaust fumes are pervasive, and steel plays a significant role in construction.The third section, representing 1950, features oil and gas drilling, open-pit mines, large-scale industry, glass and steel construction, skyscrapers, trucks, hydraulic cranes, bulldozers, explosive demolition, and growing waste dumps. The final section illustrates the building industry in 2000, dominated by concrete, highly automated extraction and manufacturing processes, destructive demolition, and massive piles of aggregate waste.

While based on historical research, these diagrammatic sections are intentionally simplified to convey the evolution of material flows over time. The emergence of key technologies is illustrated with small icons, some of which float over the section drawings, while others are placed within the matrix according to their date of invention. For example, the invention of dynamite in 1867 is represented by a dynamite icon in the demolition column for that year. These icons create a visual continuity across the timeline.

Against the backdrop of these columns (stages of the linear economy) and rows (the timeline), the diagram includes textual representations of key notions, individuals, organizations, and projects relevant to the discourse on the circular building economy. These elements are positioned according to the production stage (column) they relate to and the date of their first documented formulation. One separate column, to the right of the diagram, lists general concepts and figures that transcend any particular stage in the extraction-to-disposal sequence. These come from the field of ecological economics and its corollary, material flow studies, which has had a strong impact on circular design theory and practice.

The basic infrastructure, and the material backdrop against which the building economy unfolds, hasn’t changed much since the year 2000. Contrary to certain discourses on decoupling, the spectacular development of digital technology since the start of this century has left the sequence from extraction to disposal pretty much unchanged. The infrastructural inertia of this situation is the technological straitjacket we are locked into today, and likely will be for at least the quarter century to come. Jolting the building economy out of its linear gridlock and envisioning a meaningful future for circular design principles will require something bigger than just a few tweaks, or the dreamed-up representation of a desired horizon.